These are my must-have apps for my dev machine: Zsh, Neovim, Alacritty, Tmux, Sublime, and Tailscale. There is a reason I have two text editors, sublime is really good at opening big files, so I’ll keep it until Neovim can handle big files.
Ubuntu and Gnome have always been become my first choices of DE, it just works, ui feels intuitive, and it looks good. I used to have 4-5 workspaces that I could switch using Super + number (1…5 assigned to each workspace).